


Blame it on her Phoenix Soul

by thatdamnuchiha



Series: In the Company of Elves [10]
Category: Naruto, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Death, Dimension Travel, Gen, Haruno Sakura is So Done, Haruno Sakura-centric, Mentions of Other Crossovers, One Shot, POV Haruno Sakura, Pre-Relationship, Rare Pairings, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:40:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25371778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdamnuchiha/pseuds/thatdamnuchiha
Summary: Sakura is stuck, trapped in a cycle of endless reincarnation, each time as a different person, or in a different time, and sometimes even a different world entirely. Nothing is ever the same, and she moves on, with pain in her heart at each loss.At least until every thousandth incarnation.
Relationships: Glorfindel (Tolkien)/Haruno Sakura
Series: In the Company of Elves [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1430875
Comments: 13
Kudos: 243
Collections: Down The Rabbit Hole, Of Tales and Tears, The Many Iterations of Haruno Sakura





	Blame it on her Phoenix Soul

Sakura wasn’t exactly sure why it happened to her. Maybe she had somehow forgotten, or worse, wiped her memory through some sort of seal. Either way, the results were the same.

The first time it happened, she had seen it as an opportunity. A way to correct her mistakes – the gods had given her a chance for a redo. A way to save everyone. She had strove to better herself, because she had been reborn as Haruno Sakura once again.

The second time it happened, she was confused – more so because she hadn’t woken up as Haruno Sakura. Instead, it was Uchiha Sakura. She had taken that into her stride through, even flying blind as she was unlike what with her second life. There was no indication of what was coming her way, and Sakura didn’t like that. She hated the unknown. She hated being unable to deal with things greater than herself. _Because she had been reborn. Because she was supposed to be better than everyone else, because she had more experience._ Her best friend should never have died. She never should have awoken the mangekyou. Her brother never should have given her his own eyes upon his deathbed.

The third time it happened, she was becoming accustomed to the fact that something strange was going on, but the so-called ‘Will of Fire’ burnt bright inside her. She was Senju Sakura then, born in the warring states period, and there were a lot of lives for her to save. Sakura had just ensured she kept the fact she still had a working, fully matured sharingan to herself. When she awoke the rinnegan towards the tail end of her life, she never spoke of it. Sakura was determined to ensure the so-called Infinite Tsukuyomi never happened in her lifetime again.

It had to be a blessing that she was reincarnating so many times. There was some sort of purpose she had to fulfil, and Sakura spent the first twenty lifetimes wondering exactly what it was. Her Yin Chakra grew at a phenomenal rate with each lifetime passed, and every time she incarnated again, her Yin-Yang Chakra balance became that much more skewed, and her chakra control became that much less perfect thanks to resulting imbalance.

But it was on her fiftieth life when she was forced to face the fact that there might not have been any purpose for her constant cycle of reincarnation – for on her fiftieth lifetime, she didn’t incarnate as Sakura. She didn’t even reincarnate in the Elemental Nations. Instead, she was reborn on _earth,_ as one Hermione Granger. She wasn’t a shinobi there. Instead, she was called a _witch_ who could use a strange energy called magic. It didn’t replace her chakra, and unlike her chakra, it never followed her between reincarnations. Even when she reincarnated in that world some fifty five cycles later as Callisto Malfoy.

She didn’t even want to get started on the politics in that world. It was even more messed up, and far more corrupted than Konohagakure had ever been, and Konoha had _Danzo._

Sakura was spiteful after a few lifetimes under his less than tender care.

So much so, she had felt terribly gleeful when she chidoried him in the chest. _Multiple times._ It had been oddly thrilling, and she had been laughing like a demented Uchiha – _were there any other kinds?_ – and had swiftly found herself sympathising with the Sasuke in all of the universes where he had struck out on his own to kill the slippery bastard. If that wasn’t a sign something was wrong, she didn’t know what was.

She had borne so many names by that point, and she was growing _tired._ Tired of the constant cycle of death and rebirth she seemed to be trapped in. Every lifetime she found herself growing colder and colder towards her family members and friends, should she have any. Because at the end of the day they all died. They went to the Pure Lands, and she was reincarnated into yet another body. She couldn’t love them without feeling the stinging burn of their loss when she woke inside the body of a baby.

A hundred short lifetimes were spent in a spiral of misery and depression then, but she found she could only hold on to that bone aching numbness which consumed her for so long. It faded, especially on her more mundane lives with an uncorrupted government run on democracy. It took years upon years for her to come to an odd sort of acceptance.

There was nothing she could do to stop herself from being reborn anew. Any kind of seal designed to keep her soul from the cycle of reincarnation it was trapped in ended in failure, and Sakura dared not allow herself hope it would work. She wanted to go to the Pure Lands. She wanted to see the families she had grown to love. She wanted them to embrace her and welcome her home as they had done when she had lived with them.

By the time her thousandth lifetime came around, she had come to begrudgingly accept that it was her fate to be reborn – and that she could only make the most of every second of her new lives, no matter the pain and the ache which lingered with each cycle. But on her thousandth life, something strange happened.

She was reborn, as per usual, _but_ she had been born as something _not_ human.

Sakura found herself with several new names, as was custom there, amongst pointed eared beings who she was fairly sure were _elves_ no matter what they called themselves.

And they were unaging beings.

Immortal in some sense, but not quite in another way – for they were bound to Arda, and would share in its fate, their future beyond that unknown. Either way, it was something which Sakura wished for, as old and weary as she was in spirit. _Because it meant she could love and share a fate with those around her._

There would be no going grey, no gaining wrinkles, not that she had really managed to reach such ages in any of her latest mortal lives. Instead, she could remember her gruesome deaths so very vividly. It made her seem quite unusual, and she was spoiled by her parents and her siblings there – not just because she was a strange child though. Elves loved their children for the most part, and being the youngest, and something of a surprise to her parents who had been quite content with their number of children, made it so she was probably the most coddled and spoiled child there was.

If she hadn’t had memories of her past life, she probably would have been worried that she’d turn into a spoiled brat. As it was, she remembered all her gory deaths, and the pain of all her past lives, and figured it was about damned time she received some comeuppance.

It was only later she learnt some of the finer reasons of why she had practically been wrapped in cotton wool. Mainly due to her mother, and the name which had been bestowed upon her at birth by her. An amilessë apacenyë – a mother-name of foresight, instead of the more common mother-name of insight given as a child grew – and Sakura supposed it was a given, what with how odd of an existence she was there.

Nairëanel, her mother named her, and it was only years later that she realised why her parents had been so tearful upon her birth. Though her mother had never shared with her what she had seen in the vision granted to her, her name meant something along the lines of _sorrowful daughter_ which set a horrible weight in her gut.

But the world she was in was at peace, so Sakura tried to brush off the morbid thoughts swelling in her mind.

She lived there for a time, dividing her time between exploring with her older sister, and interacting with her family there. Because it was her chance to settle. She wasn’t made for constant reincarnations, each body she incarnated into becoming that much less stable thanks to the sheer _power_ of her soul and the chakra dragged along with her. The effect was slight with each cycle, but Sakura noticed. She was a shinobi through and through, no matter how many lives flitted by, and she knew that one day – should her incarnations continue – she would die at birth, body burnt by the sheer force of her power. _Her chakra._

Should an elf die, their spirit would reside in the Halls of Mandos for a time, and Sakura took faith in that. It was her first incarnation as such, and the fragile hope which had been sparked at the knowledge that she was no longer human bloomed. She was one of the Eldar, and her fate was no different from the rest of her kin.

Not that there was any threat to her life there. Unlike her previous incarnations, the Eldar were a more peaceful race, especially those of her mother’s kin. Sakura was happy there, content in being known by her father-name, Telpeheniel, which had come from the colouring of her eyes. They weren’t like her father’s steel-grey, nor like her mother’s which carried an oceanic blue tint to them. Instead they shone like liquid silver.

Ethereal, was the word Sakura would have once used to describe them, and the shine of her silvery eyes and the glow of her golden hair only grew as she ventured across her new lands.

But good things never seemed to last for her.

The Two Trees she had loved to dance beneath on her ventures lost their shine, plunging the world into darkness, the stars above the only light for a short while. Discontent arose amongst her father’s kin, and she went to dwell with her maternal grandfather – eager to escape the mess which would no doubt follow.

There she dwelt in peace for a short time, content by the shores, in the harbours of Alqualondë with her grandfather, uncles, and the rest of their sea-loving kin. There she was content to stay, but her fate was a cruel thing. She should have known, what with a mother-name such as Nairëanel.

Because the Noldor came, under the banner of the House of Fëanor, and Sakura could only watch as the fighting broke out. Her mother’s kin were no match for her father’s kin. For _her_ kin, for she was a Noldo through her father’s bloodline.

It was then that Sakura knew cruelty in that blissful world.

The cruelty of a blade to her gut when the only thing she had done was try to stop the fighting. _Try to prevent the bloodshed of the people she had lived with for years._

It was then that a long buried anger rose, even as she choked on her own blood amidst the sullied harbour.

It was then she knew sorrow as her grandfather found her there, golden hair spread about her like a halo, silvery eyes beginning to glaze over, too late to save from the fate she knew she would experience. She had never reached the afterlife in any cycle before that one. _So why would it be any different there?_

The fragile hope she had clung to in that life was extinguished, and her thousand and first cycle began in a cacophony of rage and sorrow – unearthed from where they had been buried deep within her mind. There was nothing as cruel as finding hope after so many years of dulling pain and bone-deep weariness, only to have it ripped away.

She knew who to blame.

_The Noldor._

_Fëanor._

Part of her cried for vengeance, because she was still a spiteful individual. She could still remember the satisfaction she gained from taking care of Danzo in the lifetimes where he’d done so much wrong unto her. Not that she would ever get the chance.

But that was where she was wrong.

It took two thousand cycles more for her to realise it – because every thousandth cycle she was reincarnated into that same timeline, though unlike what she knew of elven reincarnation, she never returned to that golden-haired, silvery-eyed form.

And then she reached cycle number nine-thousand.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this is yet another oneshot which is a prelude to another work I want to do/finish/post up eventually. Sakura/Glorfindel is endgame, because that pairing is eating at my brain for some reason, but the next work (when/if I get around to it) will be a long one (hence why I'll be waiting a bit). This oneshot is, I guess, to test the waters. Though I'll warn you now.
> 
> Here there be yet more angst. Lots and lots of angst.
> 
> Possibly with a side of redemption.


End file.
